The Secret of Dave Barry’s Humor: Class Clown Memoir and Florida Tales

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1:02One of the funniest guys I've ever spoken to, and I always enjoy speaking to, Dave Barry. He's basically been America's top humorist for about five decades, since the early 80s. And he had a column that was syndicated in 500 newspapers. He's written a ton of books, and this is his third time on the podcast, but his latest book is Class Clown, The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass. We get deep into it in this episode. this isn't your average business podcast and he's not your average host this is the james altucher show so dave barry author of a memoir you've written all these books now you finally write memoir what kind of why did you do that uh several reasons the probably the most kind of commercial one was like i mean you know i'd finished a book a couple years ago uh a novel and uh i was talking with my editor and my agent the way you do like what's your next book going to be and gradually we came around to memoirs are popular people like memoirs i was initially reluctant but they they convinced me that it was a good idea.

2:22Why were you real? Because like all my life, you know, I've written a lot about myself, but it's always been not really about myself. It's kind of using me as the everyman character to write humor. So I made a lot of jokes. I kind of present a persona, the humor, you know, the wacky humor guy persona. But there's always been a little distance between me and, you know, the written word me. I was basically thinking I'm going to entertain my readers. So as long as you were laughing and in finding it funny, that's what I wanted. To write a memoir, you got to like turn it more inward a little bit, talk about yourself really a little bit less.

2:57I mean, I still wanted it to be funny, but I also wanted to be, if I'm going to write a memoir, I could be kind of accurate. So my first worry was like, does anybody going to care? You know, like, you know, what my life was like. Was it really that interesting a life, you know, if I'm not just making jokes? So anyway, but once I plunged in, And my editors convinced me that it was going to be all right. And by then it was too late. You know, what I always admire about your career, though, is how, and it's interesting to see it unfold in this book, is, and I don't know if it's going to make sense at first, but you've sort of built your career both vertically and horizontally.

3:35And so vertically in that, okay, start as a reporter, become a columnist, start getting to be a syndicated columnist, so you're in all these papers. but then you expand it out in other ways. Like, okay, let's write screenplays. Let's make a movie. Let's write all these novels and books and so on. And so you've really like kind of pushed your career to the max as opposed to just writing Huber column for a Miami paper. It became a real phenomenon, like from television, movies, you know, again, to syndication. So you really did have an interesting life and career. But was it, I mean, that's my worry is like, is it really interesting because it's you know i maybe i've written interesting things but mainly my actual life is sitting in front of you know sitting in front of the screen going well that sucks well that's you know what i mean but but that's not actually what happens like and this is and this is where it's similar to your columns you say your columns are not really about you it's sort of like you as an everyman but i think of a lot of your columns as you doing things like when when the Times wrote the article about Miami, you go up to New York City and do stuff and actually experience New York City and then write about your personal experience there.

4:52And of course, it's in this funny, self-deprecating way, which was your style. And the book is structured like that as well. Don't you think part of your process is you do stuff and write about what happens in this kind of absurdist sort of way. Yes, and you're right. And that's sort of what made the book feel more possible to me. I do do a lot of performance humor for a writer. I mean, I don't feel like I can just sit and think of things and that's enough. I was like, for a long time, I was sort of the Miami Herald's tactical assault humorist. I went out, as you say, I went out and wrote a pretty vicious attack on New York City after the New York Times and written a story about Miami being a disaster.

5:41I did the same when the Orlando, city of Orlando, got its first basketball NBA team, the Orlando Magic and the Miami, we had just gotten ours, the Heat. And we knew both teams were gonna be terrible for a while. So at the Herald, my editors and I decided, well, let's start a rivalry between us and Orlando. So I went up there with a photographer and just wrote this vicious attack on the city of Orlando. And yeah, that was a lot of fun. And it's like really kind of non-journalistic, you know, you're not supposed to do stuff like that. You're not supposed to take sides and be inaccurate. But we just love doing that, the guys I work with at Tropic Magazine.

6:27So you're right, it was a little different. I wasn't just writing, I was doing stuff. And I kind of in my own personal life as well, I picked my son Rob up at middle school in the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile. Obviously, I did that so that I could write about it. A fair number of things just so I could write about them. And I think that you did it also with, was it Grand Forks, North Dakota? Yeah. I made fun of North Dakota, which is a mistake that nobody should ever make because they take their state seriously. They protect their state. and I got an angry letter from everybody in North Dakota. It's like 115 letters.

7:05And also, but they invited me up there. And when this kind of thing happens, it's like gold falling into your lap if you're a humorist. They invited me up to Grand Forest, North Dakota and dedicated a sewage lifting station in my honor. And I went and that was my job, but I like to go up there. And I'll never forget, I don't think I put this in my book, but I knew they would be waiting for me because they made a big deal about, you know, Dave Barry's coming and we're going to do all this stuff with Dave Barry and to Dave Barry and dedicated sewage lifting stations in Miami. But I knew they would be there.

7:38So like on the plane, I think I had to fly to Chicago and then from Chicago to North. There's no way to get to North Dakota directly from anywhere, including probably other parts of North Dakota. And on the plane, I had brought like a Bermuda, this is January now. It's like 20 below zero in North Dakota. But I had brought Bermuda shorts and a Hawaiian shirt. And on the plane, I changed, and my fellow passengers were like, what is going on? I changed so that I could come out of the plane dressed in tropical attire. That's funny. Where the city fathers of Grand Fork, North Dakota met me. They treated me great.

8:16They were really wonderful. They were thrilled to have attention paid to them. And they did, in fact, dedicate a sewage lifting station in my honor. And maybe you or somebody who's listening can explain to us why they would want to lift the sewage i don't know but i would leave it down there but up there they they lift their sewage where do they lift it to they lift it up and then i don't know what i would put it right back say whoa we don't want that put that back um there's some system involved and the less we know about it the better and and you know it's these types of like for instance with the new york city one then it becomes a story of you doing this cop so it's like a double story and then the fact that like you may like you mentioned how ed kach was asked about your column and he was he was not happy he was very cranky about it yeah right he said he said some guy in the press wrote about my you know new york everybody but what what i love about that though is a it continues the story but b it elevates your column to the point to this thing where, okay, of course, Ed Koch, the mayor of New York, read it.

9:24So it's both self-deprecating and name-dropping at the same time. Yeah, and I've become part of the story and that you're right. Again, it's all wonderful. Maybe the best example of that, my favorite, and I had forgotten all about it until I started to write the memoir, but then it came back to me, was the time, I think it was early 90s, and the big issue was telemarketers calling people at home this is when everybody had a landline and it just got had gotten out of hand they were like the phone would ring constantly and it was almost every call was from a telemarketer trying to get you to change your long distance but i mean this is how long ago this was but long distance provider you know or whatever so somebody introduced a bill in Congress to ban that, to make it so that if you wanted to opt out, you could opt out and they could never call you at home again.

10:21And an organization called the American Teleservices, they don't call themselves telemarketer, the American Teleservices Association strenuously objected to this bill. And they said that they had a constitutional right to call you at home. Congress could not block them from doing that. So I wrote a column and I said, basically, the American Teleservices Association is saying this should be unconstitutional. What do you readers think about that? Write and let me know. No, wait, don't write me. Why not just call the American Teleservices Association? And I put their phone number in. And I didn't realize what was going to happen.

11:01And I get a call the day after that column right from the New York Times. saying that they had completely, my reader said, they got thousands and thousands of phone calls, completely shut, swamped their switchboard. They had to close it down. They couldn't make or receive any telephone calls at the American television. And they were furious. They were furious that this had happened to them. Like the same thing that had been happening to all of us. And that was just what you were talking about in a example where I became part of the story, but it kind of in a like really gratifying way. And I had to tell the New York Times how regretful I was that I had wrecked the American Teleservice Association's switchboard operation.

11:43So you didn't assert your constitutional right, though? Like, it's interesting that the directions you take, because you have a bunch of funny possible paths to go from there once they're so upset at you. but I guess saying you're regretful is actually you're saying what they should what's funny is you're saying what they should have been saying as opposed to you arguing with them you're thinking way more about this than I ever did James I basically just thought hey this is funny we screwed them up and I talk about quite a bit in the book how my readers and this is another big difference I think between my kind of column and most columns that made it kind of really wonderful for me is that I think the traditional relationship between columnist and reader is, I am pronouncing and you're reading.

12:36And, you know, I may get feedback from you, but basically it's a one-way thing. It's me pronouncing one. But with my readers, it was really, they were my allies. I mean, they gave me a whole lot of story ideas. I had this thing going for years, like alert readers. I would always give them credit when they alerted me to some insane story, some toilet exploded somewhere. I would hear about it from my alert readers. But also I could enlist them in things like that, crusades where they would step up and they think they really loved that. The readers, they felt part of the column. Yeah, I think that's true.

13:12I think you built a community because of your self-deprecation, because you included yourself, even in some small way into the column, they related to you. Yeah, my persona was never the authority and never the guru. It was always, I'm kind of a goof, an idiot. I'm just like, I don't know what I'm doing. Why am I even in the newspaper? That kind of thing. So you guys out there reader, you know just as much as I do, you can be part of this too. That was the idea. There was also one thing about, well, first off, one thing is, When I was reading this and I've read your other stuff, it always reminds me a little bit of a kind of more humorous Hunter S.

14:00Thompson. Because Hunter S. Thompson would basically put himself in these insane situations. And his approach then was take a lot of drugs and then write about what happened. In his particular style. Or write about what he would imagine would happen. Or just write about whatever was going on in his brain. But take a lot of drugs was the key there. but but like it would like finagle his way onto like richard nixon's airplane during you know 1972 campaign and the next thing you know you have fear and loathing in 72 and on the campaign child 72 and it's it reminded me of your style a little bit that you put yourself in the situation and then you're dave barry in that situation and it's funny so yeah he would hunter thompson was very much yeah he was writing about whenever he wrote he was writing about hunter s thompson i I mean, his reaction.

14:47Right, and he wasn't an authority. He would act like an authority, actually, but it was clear he wasn't an authority. Right. He was just the guy who was telling you whatever he wanted to do about what was going on. And sometimes you see sports writers do that, too. Like, they're in, you know, like maybe Norman Mailer's piece on the fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. He's, like, on the scene and writing it from his perspective, almost, which is not... He kind of pretended to be more of an authority than he was, so maybe it's not a good comparison. But Hunter S. Thompson reminded me the most of that particular approach.

15:26Or P.J. O 'Rourke was another guy. P.J. O 'Rourke definitely. He was a buddy of mine. And P.J. was a good friend of mine, but that was, when you read P.J., you were reading it to see what P.J. thought about whatever it was. He was much more informed than I ever was. P.J. was a very smart guy, and he really knew what he was talking about. But that was his approach. this is my view of the world. Yeah. No, and sadly, he passed away. He was on the podcast right before that happened. And I've always enjoyed his work as well. And you've mentioned in here that Art Buchwald was a real inspiration to you.

16:04But I don't quite see Art Buchwald the same way as he doesn't really put himself in the situation more. He's more like a pure absurdist, say. Yeah, no, Art was my friend. and when I was a kid, he was like the god of humor columnists in this country. But I never patterned myself after him. He was a very traditional Washington-based, writes about politics writer, very topical, but very much a specific style, not nearly the goofball or performance type that I was. Another thing about your style, and you've talked about this before, which is that you'll take an idea that seems absurd to you, and then you'll stretch it to the maximum.

16:50You'll exaggerate it in ways that are funny. You'll go there. You'll just do whatever it takes to kind of like almost magnify the supposed seriousness of the topic, but then how ridiculous it is to take that topic seriously. And I find that to be a consistent. And you do this in the memoir as well. You know, it's part of the self-deprecation. Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, exaggeration is kind of an essential tool of the humorist, and I do use it a lot.

17:26Take a quick break. If you like this episode, I'd really, really appreciate it. It would mean so much to me. Please share it with your friends and subscribe to the podcast. Email me at altitra at gmail.com and tell me why you subscribed. Thanks.

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18:37For one thing, you can post a job. LinkedIn's new feature can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people. You get qualified candidates. At the end of the day, the most important thing to your business is the quality of the candidates. And with LinkedIn, of course, you can feel confident that you're getting the best. Based on LinkedIn data, 72 % of small and medium businesses say using LinkedIn helps them find high-quality candidates. Find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today. Find your next great hire on LinkedIn.

19:09Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash altature. That's linkedin.com slash altature to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. Another thing also that's interesting about your career, and I'm jealous of this, there's an aspect of your career which it seems like it can't happen anymore, which is syndication. Syndication must've been such a wonderful thing for the columnists back then, which to those who don't know what it is, it's you have a column in the Miami Herald And then suddenly 500 other newspapers around the country are paying you to reprint it because there's no national network called Twitter or Facebook, whatever, where everybody in the world could see what you write.

19:47Exactly. I mean, I was so lucky that syndication existed. And I tell the story in the book of how, like, I sort of discovered this, the beauty of it, which was the first really successful thing I wrote that a lot of people wanted to print, reprint, was an essay I wrote about natural childbirth, which I wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1980. And the Inquirer paid me$350, which is by far the most money. I was not making a living as a writer back then. I had a little column going on the side, but I was not getting paid a lot of money to do that. $350 was the most money I'd ever gotten for anything.

20:24And I was very happy about that. And I remember the day after it ran in the Inquirer, it ran on a Sunday. On the Monday, I got a call in my home in Glen Mills, Pennsylvania from an editor at the Chicago Tribune who said, I saw your piece in the Inquirer. I loved it. I'd like to reprint it. And I'm like, great. And he goes, how much do you charge? And this is a question that had never arisen in my life. Nobody ever wanted to reprint anything. And I thought, well, I've already made$350, so anything else is gravy. So I said, how about $50? And there's a pause and he goes, we'll pay you $500. Oh my gosh.

21:03And like I'm thinking if only I had said$25, he might have counted with$1 ,000. But that was, and that one piece, it ended up a whole bunch of newspapers reprinted it and they all paid me for it. And I was stunned by this. And it was then that I began to see then and then in the months succeeding that, because each of these newspapers that reprinted that then wanted to know, well, what else have you written? And I said, well, I write this little column. And it started to snowball from there. But you're absolutely right. It was a fantastic thing for me, just a windfall. It made it possible for me to leave what I was doing, which was working for a living, and become a writer all the time um and it could not possibly happen today for exactly the reason you say i mean you write it one place and everybody on the internet can find it one way or another they'll get it whether they pay for it legitimately or not they can find it well the downside the let me just say the downside of syndication my column ran at the high highlight high point in 500 newspapers um now a lot of newspapers would just take it and put it in you know which is perfect from me at my perspective like whatever I wrote, they printed.

22:15But a lot of them, you know, the bigger newspapers with the bigger staffs, they have editors and those editors feel responsible for doing, you know, whatever was in the newspaper. So they'd read it and they'd make little changes or they'd object to things or they would cut it for space or whatever. So I had like, I always had essentially hundreds of editors after the editor that I really had written it for, which was the one at the Miami Herald. And I'd only hashed out with him, you know, whatever I agreed with or didn't agree with about whatever changes you want to make. All these other people could make changes.

22:46And like I would get letters from readers who'd said, I read your column here and then I also read it here. And I noticed it was really, and I'd look at these two versions and one of them would be what I wrote originally. And one of them would be like the same column with like half was gone or all the punchlines were gone or something could change to, they could do whatever they wanted. They paid me, you know, for the, you know. And every now and then it would be so awful what they'd done that I would write to them and say, if you're going to do this to my column, I would really be happier if you just didn't run it.

23:20You don't have to buy it. You don't have to pay for it. But it's supposed to be a humor column. And if you can take all the humor out of it, it just looks bad. Please don't run my column. Please don't do this anymore. And sometimes it would be a taste thing, because I was not known for being particularly tasteful. And so some newspapers would just not run it. But that was actually kind of fun for me, because then I could write a column about the newspaper that didn't run the column or objected to it. And I did that a few times. Some editors really hated me because of that. I like that turning the process into a story as well.

23:55I think that's a very valuable thing. And you're not supposed to do that. That was definitely a violation of one of the rules of how journalism is supposed to work. You don't call out the newspaper that's running a column. But I could do it. I could get away with it because I was in a bunch of papers. Yeah. And it's, yeah, because each paper sort of wants to pretend that they're the only ones running your column. So when you write about them running your column and it's one of 500, it sort of removes the Wizard of Oz effect. Yeah, you're pulling back. I was just going to say, you're pulling back the curtain a little bit.

24:33There's real people doing this. I'm writing it. A bunch of people are editing it. and sometimes we don't agree. By the way, it also shows, you know, how writing, how the industry of writing has changed, not only with syndication, but the fact that you even got$350 in 1982, which is, I don't know, something like$2 ,000 in today's numbers. No one, no, let's say, non-famous columnist would ever get$2 ,000 right now. Or by the way, would never get$350 right now for a column. So there's been deflation of what people pay writers. Well, you're absolutely right. And it's kind of a sad thing. The supply of writing far exceeds the demand, which is why Substack is, for some people,

25:24it's righted that balance a little bit if you are able to be successful, if you're able to find an audience. But you're right. It's gotten rough for freelance writers, very rough. So if you were starting now and you had the same, or relatively the same set of interests and the interests of writing and potentially being a humorist, what would you do? Like, how would you do it? Obviously a Substack, but how would you build an audience then? I don't know. I mean, I get asked that a lot and I have no answer for it because there's just so, if you go to look at Substack, there's just a lot of people writing on it.

26:02I mean, tons and tons, whatever genre you pick. It's mostly people, two main categories, which is politics. And there's tends to be a great, you know, you know, the two sides we have in politics and the two sides are pretty predictable. And you're gonna see a lot of what you see, a lot of what you expect from the pro-Trump people. And you're gonna see a lot of what you expect from the anti-Trump people. There's just way more supply than demand from both of those points of view. A lot of it is people who want a book deal. They want to be novelists. Again, way more supply than a man, you know. And poetry, forget about it.

26:35There's like a great supply. No demand is what I think about for poetry. I don't think there's ever been demand for poetry. No, I know. You get in trouble when you say that, but you are so correct. So it's like, I don't know, honestly don't know how you get going. And I think the way you get going, most likely, this is just a guess, and it's not an informed guess because it's not what I do, but is you go on like x and you tweet funny stuff just want you know because they're the attention span is very short but you can get in it you can get something out there and if it's really really funny somebody might be a little bit interested in the look what else you've written but to just like expect it you're right you could write a really brilliant essay and put it on substack and if you know unless some miracle happens most people will never see it it's because there's just so many other essays on Substack.

27:26Yeah. And you know, and one thing I've noticed just in the past, let's say 10 to 15 years is that you could like 10 years ago, you could still write articles. You could put the link on, let's say Twitter. And if it's good and you build a reputation and people repost it, it'll get shared. But now I feel like it's even harder to do that. You have to kind of post the whole story directly on Twitter. And then if it's good, people will share it. Because if it's just, if it's a link out of Twitter, the Twitter algorithm now doesn't like that as much or the X algorithm doesn't like that. So it won't really let your article be popular, your tweet be popular.

28:02So it's difficult. But one thing I would suggest though, like take that breakout article that the Chicago Tribune men reprinted. It was, it was your experience with childbirth, which is for a man is just a ludicrous proposition in many cases. And so still, even though there's an oversupply of words being written, there is never an oversupply of experiences. There's only so much experience that one person can have. So I still think diving into an experience that's relatable and you look at it in this humorous way, I think that's still a winning advantage. Right, but I mean, again, finding a way to reach the audience, though, is the tricky part.